For those who don’t have a retail disc, you can download a free (and legal) recovery disc here. At least Microsoft’s done one thing right for once.
Coppermine Photo Gallery
November 6, 2009 — aimeewilburyHaven’t gotten a chance to test it, but it looks rather nice. Needs PHP and mySQL on the webserver. Open-source.
Need email forwarding? SoodoNims might be for you
October 20, 2009 — aimeewilburyOK, so a while back, due to spam, the administrator of a message board I frequent blocked Gmail. For a while, I used Yahoo Mail, but it’s a bit of a pain to forward everything manually (I got quite a few PM notifications, and I like to keep them for memories.)
So after a while, I found SoodoNims. Exactly what I needed, automatic email forwarding. If you need it, you can also delete the emails after a while or block certain domains (e.g. spam).
Oh, and one good thing: Just today, for some reason the emails weren’t coming through. I sent a quick email to the administrator, less than 2 hours later, it’s working again (and I even got the ‘missing’ emails!)
CheckPlaces
October 19, 2009 — aimeewilburyNice Firefox extension to check both dead and duplicate bookmarks. Still in experimental but I haven’t had any problems with it (except it being slow, I have huge amount of bookmarks.)
Lots of duplicates? CloneSpy might work.
October 17, 2009 — aimeewilburyCloneSpy is one of those indispensible tools, one of the ones that I install first on a clean-install of Windows and never get rid of. What it does is take checksums for a bunch of files and compares them to find duplicates.
One of the useful things is the “pools,” in which you can take two seperate sets of folders and compare them against each other, and sometimes automatically delete the duplicates from one of them. For example, when I do a clean-install, I usually tend to restore all my data from a backup. And sometimes I’m reluctant to delete the Windows.old in case I accidentally delete a file I haven’t backed up. So what I do, I put the User folder into pool one, Windows.old into pool two and set it to automatically delete, then go take a bath. When I come back, the leftover files are still in Windows.old, so I transfer them over then delete.
Also especially useful for duplicate pictures. One limitation in VisiPics is that even on “strict” setting, it sometimes grabs pictures which are very similar, but not quite. (I’m a bit of a hoarder.) So by checking the checksums, it can find the exact same one.
Oh and it’s free. 
Free is always good with me.
My new camera
October 14, 2009 — aimeewilburyIt’s a FujiFilm FinePix S3000. Nice little camera, got it at a yard sale for $10. Although I had to pay $30 more for a card reader, still pretty cheap.
Couple of piccies I took with it.
Woke up the poor cat from his afternoon nap:
My floppy disk:
I wasn’t aware my cat was into computers:
And this is my main computer:
Another free word processor.
September 27, 2009 — aimeewilburyThis time it’s PolyEdit. Although the free version is only for personal use, it seems to have everything you need in a free one (except the ability to check for updates from the program). Although the interface seems a bit too much like Microsoft Word for my comfort, it’s fairly easy to use and has tabs (I like tabbed word processors.)
I also like the ability to change text to uppercase or lowercase, and the way they use templates (it has its own “Templates” menu where you can save them and use them.)
Altogether a pretty nifty one.
Fake Name Generator
September 19, 2009 — aimeewilburyIt’s quite interesting to see what you can get by messing with options. I have yet to get a duplicate. There’s also a bulk generator (“Order Bulk Identities”) which I imagine could be used for testing databases.
